 The efforts of the Syriac missionaries facilitated the Church’s expansion deep into the interior and caused friction with the traditions of the local people.The Syriac missions also served as permanent centers of Christian learning in which Syriac monks finally began to translate the Bible and other religious texts from Greek into Ethiopic so that their converts could actually read Scripture.These translations were vital to the spread of Christianity, no longer a religion for the small percentage of Ethiopians who could read Greek, throughout Ethiopia.